A proposal for the New Shape Prize: CIVICS: Changing Incentives for Voters in International Cooperation through Sampling

This model is built around the principle that any actor in a global governance institution should have interests aligned with mankind’s. This means creating an incentive structure to make sure that in each different component, every member’s best interest is to faithfully play their role, which is sadly not the case today.Despite widespread awareness of the dangers of inaction on issues such as climate change, policy on the matter evolves very slowly, although a strong majority in most countries would prefer their government do more to prevent or counter its effects (including India, China and the USA). This is only one specific case of humanity agreeing on the need for action (and even often on what needs to be done), only for most policy-makers to shrink from pursuing truly effective policies due to personal or electoral risks and diverse lobbying interests. Current policy-makers do have an advantage, however, in that they are able to spend more time focused on the issue with teams of experts, and have access to more detailed and current information.The goal is then to have decision-makers with the same interests as the general population, but with a decent understanding of the consequences of any decision taken. Once we make sure that the decision-makers are incorruptible, well-intentioned and well-informed, it is enough to design a system by which their decisions are respected and implemented by the international community. This model presents one way of obtaining such a set of decision-makers, and the tools they need to enforce the decisions taken. Our model has a traditional parliamentary structure with some nuances. The upper house is mostly present to bring expertise and guidance from the international community, while the lower house composed of anonymous citizens is in charge of the final decision. An executive council then makes sure that the decisions are respected by all the member countries. We will first explain some recent theoretical and technological developments which are at the heart of the model. Once this is done, we will present its different components and show how the model could be implemented before analyzing its potential weaknesses and their respective solutions

A proposal for the New Shape Prize: CIVICS: Changing Incentives for Voters in International Cooperation through Sampling

International audienceThis model is built around the principle that any actor in a global governance institution should have interests aligned with mankind’s. This means creating an incentive structure to make sure that in each different component, every member’s best interest is to faithfully play their role, which is sadly not the case today.Despite widespread awareness of the dangers of inaction on issues such as climate change, policy on the matter evolves very slowly, although a strong majority in most countries would prefer their government do more to prevent or counter its effects (including India, China and the USA). This is only one specific case of humanity agreeing on the need for action (and even often on what needs to be done), only for most policy-makers to shrink from pursuing truly effective policies due to personal or electoral risks and diverse lobbying interests. Current policy-makers do have an advantage, however, in that they are able to spend more time focused on the issue with teams of experts, and have access to more detailed and current information.The goal is then to have decision-makers with the same interests as the general population, but with a decent understanding of the consequences of any decision taken. Once we make sure that the decision-makers are incorruptible, well-intentioned and well-informed, it is enough to design a system by which their decisions are respected and implemented by the international community. This model presents one way of obtaining such a set of decision-makers, and the tools they need to enforce the decisions taken. Our model has a traditional parliamentary structure with some nuances. The upper house is mostly present to bring expertise and guidance from the international community, while the lower house composed of anonymous citizens is in charge of the final decision. An executive council then makes sure that the decisions are respected by all the member countries. We will first explain some recent theoretical and technological developments which are at the heart of the model. Once this is done, we will present its different components and show how the model could be implemented before analyzing its potential weaknesses and their respective solutions

Cyclin A2 Mutagenesis Analysis: A New Insight into CDK Activation and Cellular Localization Requirements

Cyclin A2 is essential at two critical points in the somatic cell cycle: during S phase, when it activates CDK2, and during the G2 to M transition when it activates CDK1. Based on the crystal structure of Cyclin A2 in association with CDKs, we generated a panel of mutants to characterize the specific amino acids required for partner binding, CDK activation and subcellular localization. We find that CDK1, CDK2, p21, p27 and p107 have overlapping but distinct requirements for association with this protein. Our data highlight the crucial importance of the N-terminal α helix, in conjunction with the α3 helix within the cyclin box, in activating CDK. Several Cyclin A2 mutants selectively bind to either CDK1 or CDK2. We demonstrate that association of Cyclin A2 to proteins such as CDK2 that was previously suggested as crucial is not a prerequisite for its nuclear localization, and we propose that the whole protein structure is involved

Large expert-curated database for benchmarking document similarity detection in biomedical literature search

Document recommendation systems for locating relevant literature have mostly relied on methods developed a decade ago. This is largely due to the lack of a large offline gold-standard benchmark of relevant documents that cover a variety of research fields such that newly developed literature search techniques can be compared, improved and translated into practice. To overcome this bottleneck, we have established the RElevant LIterature SearcH consortium consisting of more than 1500 scientists from 84 countries, who have collectively annotated the relevance of over 180 000 PubMed-listed articles with regard to their respective seed (input) article/s. The majority of annotations were contributed by highly experienced, original authors of the seed articles. The collected data cover 76% of all unique PubMed Medical Subject Headings descriptors. No systematic biases were observed across different experience levels, research fields or time spent on annotations. More importantly, annotations of the same document pairs contributed by different scientists were highly concordant. We further show that the three representative baseline methods used to generate recommended articles for evaluation (Okapi Best Matching 25, Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency and PubMed Related Articles) had similar overall performances. Additionally, we found that these methods each tend to produce distinct collections of recommended articles, suggesting that a hybrid method may be required to completely capture all relevant articles. The established database server located at https://relishdb.ict.griffith.edu.au is freely available for the downloading of annotation data and the blind testing of new methods. We expect that this benchmark will be useful for stimulating the development of new powerful techniques for title and title/abstract-based search engines for relevant articles in biomedical research.Peer reviewe